Internet Entrepreneurship

I recently read an article about user-generated Digg.com being up for sale again (after nearly selling to Yahoo! back in 2006) and this time hiring influential investment bankers at Allen & Co. to search out prospective buyers. They would be aiming for nearly $300 million dollars, although speculation shows that they may now be contemplating selling for somewhere in the neighborhood of $225 million. Rumor has it that there are four “prospective” buyers in Murdoch’s News Corp (which owns MySpace), Google, Microsoft, and a fourth unknown.

Whether or not this decision to sell was affected by the potential sale of Yahoo! to Microsoft as a merger with MSN is unknown; If MSN were to merge with Yahoo!, Google may be more motivated to raise bids with regards to Digg and also to increase their involvement in the world of social media.

(Info on digg: Digg.com is an entirely web 2.0 user-driven site. One can submit videos, podcasts, articles etc. which others on the site can then browse. For more in depth information - the site describes itself well.)

I can’t for the life of me remember where I read that little blurb, but it’s a pretty good evaluation of the still young social networking site Virb°.

The folks behind the site call themselves Virb Inc. and are the same gang that created PureVolume back in 2003. (By the way, if you’re into the indie music scene and you haven’t ever heard of PureVolume then you need to go there now. I mean right away, forget the rest of this article for now, it’ll be here when you come back I promise.)

At first glance, Virb looks like just another MySpace clone, but upon closer inspection there’s plenty that sets it apart.

Virb breaks down its profiles into three categories at the moment. They are: personal, music, and organization. This comes in handy because, for example, I can choose to allow friend requests from personal pages, but block requests from bands. This brings back memories of spam-filled MySpace inboxes full of requests from guys who make techno in their basement. I can also choose to display my personal friends, band friends, and organization friends independently on my profile.

Virb has a couple other useful little perks like the ability to upload video with no quality restrictions and the option to link you profile to the rss/atom feed of your blog and have the posts automatically copied onto you Virb profile.

What Virb really does an excellent job with is customization. Virb provides you with several options to tweak the looks of your profile page. For the everyday user, there are two basic editors. One allows you to change some basic formatting options, simple things like fonts and colors. The other allows you to arrange the position of “modules” on your page. More on Virb modules in a moment.

<- Basic Syle Editor

For those who are a little more web savvy and want a higher level of customization Virb also allows you to directly edit the CSS and XHTML for your profile page. And the addition of Virb modules makes the editing even easier. Virb breaks down every aspect of your page into modules. They have several basic modules already set up for you, one for displaying comments, pictures, meta, etc. Now say I wanted to add a little RSS feed widget to my profile page. I could go to the advanced editor and code it in there, but I could also make a custom module and place the code there. That way, when I go to the editor I have the option of simply referencing that module rather than typing out the full code. This keeps the code incredibly organized and makes things easy to re-arrange.

Amidst all this customization, Virb threw in another little goodie that I just love. Remember all those MySpace profiles that burned your eyes with their bright colors, unreadable font, and general feeling that someone had up and vomited random HTML all over the place? (And by one I mean one in five…) Well guess what. Now you don’t have to look at it! At the top of every profile page Virb gives you a “remove customization” option that allows you to view the page with the default layout and settings and avoid any annoying colors you may encounter.

<-Custom  Removed->

Overall, Virb seems to have taken something old, kept what worked, fixed a few things that didn’t and added their own unique feel. It might never be the leading social networking site, but it’s a great place to advertise a startup band, get a new organization noticed, or just have an extra place to show your blog and get a little more traffic. I wouldn’t be surprise to see some real growth there in the near future.

In creating a website and trying to make money through advertising there are multiple things that need to be looked at. Many of the presenters in the elevator pitch competition talked about using advertisements as a source of income. The first and easiest way to advertise on a site would be through Google Adsense or Kontera. All you need to do with these sites is put code on your site where you want the ad to show up and you will have ads. The problem with these ads is that depending on what your site deals with the ads may not be very relevant and you also may not make very much per click. I think I am making around 5 cents per click which isn’t making me millions.

Another way which could end up being a better way to advertise would be using an affiliate. In this you work with a company either selling a service or product. What happens is if you send people to the affiliates site and those people purchase the service or product you get a percentage of the sale. This can end up making you more money than the Google Adsense because you will be making much more per purchase.

The Last method that I know of is selling advertising space. This can by far be the most profitable form of online advertising. In order to get people interested in your site and sell ad space you need to have a lot of traffic and relevant content. This is probably the biggest payout but also the hardest advertisement to get because they will be paying per month or per year.

So all in all there are a lot of different ways to advertise on websites and blogs you just have to pick the right one for you. The key to success obviously is traffic, traffic, traffic. The more people you have come to your site that you can convert the more money you will make off of these advertising opportunities.

This is an incredibly neat little widget I stumbled across today. It's only been live for about a month now so I figured it was worth a little write-up.

"ThatsMyMouse" is a tool that allows users on your site to see not just their own cursors, but the location of anyone else's cursor who happens to be browsing the site simultaneously! Users have the option of enabling or disabling ThatsMyMouse and are even able to chat with other users on the page via a little chat window and little word bubbles that appear above their cursor's marker. If a users cursor does not move for a certain amount of time the user will be designated as idle and the marker will show a little "zzzz." The novelty of it all is certainly fun. You can check it out for yourself with a little demo here:

ThatsMyMouse Demo

I'm not really sure if this is actually something that will catch on. It brings to mind visions of popular sites cluttered with cursor markers, and I'm not sure how this would effect a sites performance. Of course there is always the option to turn it off, so if you don't want to see those cluttering markers you don't have too…

Something like this could perhaps have place if integrated with a network like digg or stumble upon. Sort of a "real time tagging" sort of thing. I'm interested how you guys think this will fit into the web 2.0 trend, so throw out some comments if you've got an idea!

It slips my mind who it was, but someone in class had a great idea of an online newspaper or "e-zine"

I stumbledupon this and the concept seems similar similar or at least would help augment the idea proposed in class. The gist is that you create a personal newspaper from your RSS and Atom feeds. It allows you to create a personal one for yourself or to publish one for others consumption.

Feed Journal | The Newspaper You Always Wanted

Whoever had the idea, please comment and let us know how this fits in with your vision and how you think they could improve upon the idea. Maybe this is a totally unrelated idea from yours but I think this is still a cool concept.

It struck me today that one of the most successful brands I’ve ever seen, has been built by a college drop out, and I’m not talking Gates or Zuckerburg. I’m talking Johnny Cupcakes.

http://www.johnnycupcakes.com/blog/

This New England native has built a brand with a cult following and rather than “selling out” for the quick pay day, he continues to build a company I admire more everyday. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him at his Newbury Street shop in Boston on a couple of occasions and you’d never guess you were bumping into the owner of the store.

Basically he sells T-shirts with cupcakes on them. Basically as he describes it, “I got off my bum and went for it”. You don’t need to have a million dollar idea you simply need to have the passion and desire to execute. His exclusive boutique has the feel of a bakery and t-shirts are limited edition. Take a glance around his website and you’ll see why this kid has succeeded. Great lesson in Internet Entrepreneurship, if you like his stuff, buy something through the online store!

Robert Frost wrote a poem entitled “Fragmentary Blue,” in which he pondered why humanity took such delight in the beautiful blue present in birds, flowers, eyes, etc. He ends the poem by hypothesizing that we view the blue sky as heavenly, and because we cannot reach it, we revel in nature’s heavenly reminder to us through fragmentary blue. Right now, social networking is all fragmentary blue. We express a certain part of ourself on Facebook, Myspace, and others, however, we never really display our whole self, and we limit our ability to network in doing so. There are job networking sites (a plethora of them, focusing on recent grads or 100k+ jobs, etc.), school networking sites, band networking sites, ad infinitum. These sites are all specialized for a reason, but they lose a part of the person when doing so. What if there was a website that allowed users to collect all of their online (and offline!) activity and chose to whom and how they want to display it?

Every game is an escape from reality in some fashion or another. Games take some element of reality and simulate it to varying degrees. Battleship, for example, simulates a naval battle by allowing opposing players to select where on a board to place their ships and where to fire their missiles. Fog of war is simulated to increase the challenge. Second life’s goal, as its title suggests, is to simulate life itself. A digital world with digital assets is nothing new. Pixels have long been used to display uber cool gear. Bits have long been used to store phat lewt. However, never before have digital goods been transferable to tangible goods. (Selling characters and gear on EBay doesn’t really count…)

The conversion of in-game money to real life money has created a completely new ethical dilemma. It means that any asset a person has in game can be sold in game and converted into dollars. In fact, these are generally fairly liquid funds that can be used in a pinch if needed. Some may question whether bits should be bought and sold, but that doesn’t concern me. We buy TVs, which merely display bits. We buy internet access, which merely transfers bits. In short, we’re already paying for bits for the sole purpose of entertainment. Why should it matter if people start paying more for entertainment through bits?

The real question is this: if imaginary assets can be quickly and easily transferable to real goods, should they be included as part of a person’s net worth? Should Second Life assets be taxable? These exact questions are being investigated at the moment. It’s actually rather easy to imagine a money-laundering scheme that goes through Second Life in order to avoid government “interference.” Additionally, some people make their living on Second Life. Should they be taxed on their assets in game? Should casual players who merely play the game for some cheap enjoyment also be forced to pay taxes on the bits that they own, even if they never plan to convert them to cash?

10 years ago, the idea of ebay would have sounded absurd to most people. Who in his right mind would buy something from a random stranger over the internet? Anonymity, one of the internet’s biggest strengths, is also one of its biggest weaknesses. Ebay has successfully harnessed the power of the individual on the web while constraining the uncertainty his anonymity brings. User-controlled feedback has created an online community where anonymous pseudonyms are held accountable for their actions, allowing for a sense of certainty and creating the trust necessary to spend money online. Paypal also plays an important part in this process. It acts as a third party to hold the buyer’s money as the seller ships the auctioned item and completes the payment when the item arrives. This means that, even if there is fraud, the buyer is insured.

The way I see it, EBay’s greatest success is the seamless integration it has with Paypal. It’s so easy that senior citizens, who are usually either apathetic to or scared of the internet, can buy and sell online. (Getting them used to the idea of interacting with an anonymous person online is a different story, though. Some perceptions just take some time to change!)